JPMorgan Buys Bear Stearns For $2 Per Share and I'm Not Sure If They Got a Good Deal

Filed in archive Investing on March 17, 2008

I'm sure you're not hearing it here first, that JPMorgan Chase (JPM) bought Bear Stearns for just $2 per share, or about $236 million. Bear Stearns was seemingly about to go bankrupt but it's stock price was still $30 on Friday, which was almost a 50% drop after it announced it basically had no money left to pay anyone anything. Can you imagine if you owned Bear Stearns a week ago and were out of town Friday and missed the news? You've lost just about everything you had in that stock.

But here's what I'm wondering: is this good for JPMorgan? JP Morgan is paying less for Bear Stearns as a company than Bear Stearns' headquarters building alone is worth, not to mention all the relationships and business that Bear Stearns has acquired in the last 100 or so years. It sounds like a steal. But JPMorgan is so unsure of what they have in Bear Stearns and its many debts that they got the Fed to guarantee a ton of backup should there be something even worse than they know about on the books. In short, they can't even believe they got this kind of a bargain, so they figure there must be something they're missing.

I own some JPMorgan stock. As bad as this Bear Stearns news is in general, in terms of how it will further shake confidence and ream the market as a whole, I as a JPM investor should be jumping for joy that the company I own a small piece off has pulled off this coup.

And yet I'm slightly afraid. And I think the fact that I'm on the winning side but am still afraid says an awful lot about the market we're in right now, and a lot about what the future holds, at least in the near term. It's gonna get even uglier.

UPDATE: Took a 12% gain on JPMorgan today and ran. Just bought the stock last week and couldn't resist that kind of return in such a short time, especially in this market.